The Botany of Desire

In this ingenious turnabout of conventional thinking, James Beard Award–winning food and agriculture writer Michael Pollan demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a reciprocal relationship similar to that of flowers and bees. Pollan links four basic human desires (sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control) with plants that satisfy them (the apple, the tulip, the marijuana plant, and the potato) and illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings, thereby ensuring their own survival. So who, Pollan asks with a wink, is really domesticating whom?

"Michael Pollan is a sensualist and a wonderful, funny storyteller. He is so engaging that his profound environmental messages are effortlessly communicated. He makes you fall in love with Nature."—Alice Waters